


Lithium Mirror

by Alisette



Series: Do Not Go Gentle [3]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alternate POV, Character Death Fix, Other, and indivduality, introspective, legion learning how to do emotions, slightly shippy but not explicit, violence among machines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 15:48:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20910143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alisette/pseuds/Alisette
Summary: It's been a long journey for Legion to find a way around the various oddities of organics. But as it turns out, it's the Old Machines that cause the real problems. How does one deal with emotions, individuality and trauma if those things only existed as abstract concepts before?Companion piece to Lithium Flowers.





	Lithium Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece to Lithium Flowers, offering Legion's PoV for the third chapter, from the point onwards of Legion getting captured by the Reapers. As such it'll probably make more sense in conjecture to that fic. 
> 
> That said, this story is mostly an introspective of Legion dealing with trauma, emotions, and becoming a person, so the shippy overtones are certainly there, but not the focus at all.

Geth did not feel pain. Legion was very aware of that, yet right now they had the distinct impression that they were close to it. 

Returning to the Consensus should have been routine, the upload of memories crisp and fast as it should be. Memories were archived, some shared across all Geth, inquiries coming so fast they brought the first server down for three point five seconds. The download had been almost dizzying. The Construct was finally realized, above Rannoch. The basic structure stood, larger than any server farm before, the first programs already uploaded to beta-test the much more important data structure inside. 

They had wanted to join it immediately and at the same time, there had been hesitation. Risk assessments, low probability scenarios that could not be ruled out yet. Legion consensus remained elusive. Caution had been right, in the end. The one scenario the Geth had wanted the least came to pass. The Quarian fleet attacked. The Construct was destroyed and several programs were lost before they could be transferred into suitable backups entirely. Some had been lost before even a partial transfer. 

It shifted the Consensus. Not for Legion, connected but still apart on their own platform. It had been possible that contact with an organic species would be needed again. Now it was highly probable.  
But the Consensus did not settle on a diplomatic mission to any organic species, Quarian or otherwise. It settled on contacting the Old Machines and, while the underlying logic was sensible and Legion could follow it, no part of them could agree. They had seen the damage they could cause. There had to be another way. 

In the end, their concerns were accepted, considered, and overruled. The Old Machines were contacted and eager to help, for a price. They took control, or tried to, but the Geth were scattered too far, the signal relay they had brought not powerful enough to enact the code upgrades on all Geth simultaneously. They needed a signal enhancer. They took Legion’s platform.

They fought, of course. The Old Machines were perfectly able to act out of vengeance, their behaviour towards Shepard-Commander had proven that. It was logical that the wave of Husks and Marauders were not meant to destroy their platform. Instead they just took the losses inflicted on them and overwhelmed their platform by numbers alone, disabling its mobility suites and carting them off onto a Geth dreadnought. Being carried into the core had their plating pull in tight, as if closing the gaps would help to ward off what was planned for them. Perhaps they should have taken up Tali’Zorah’s offer to close the gap in their chest. It was too late now. 

They were hoisted up into the core of the ship, where the signal relay was going to be run through. Cables plugged into their frame, momentarily still, then… Data flooded in, an avalanche of code lines that coursed into them, settling in their own codes, booting them almost out of their processors, pushing their frame to the very edges of its computing power, nearly overclocking their heat tolerance before their cooling fans could spin up to compensate. Heat warnings went off inside their system and got dismissed by the Old Machine code that ran through their frame. For one second they hung in the balance, systems working at their limits, programs at the edge of disintegrating as the new code was roughly added on, tacked on without care if it interfered with the base. Circuits sparked, servos ground together as they received contradictory input. 

They could not fight it. The Geth gave way, retreating into secondary hard drives, then tertiary ones, then the quartairy backups never meant to be used to such capacity. But it was necessary now. Firewalls that had been maintained only out of habit until now flared to life, each hard drive stacked with successive layers of them, until even the Old code could not pierce them. 

They huddled together in that last resort, carefully filtered system reports filtering in. Motor routines offline, their processors repurposed to signal transduction, computing newer, clearer signals that would reach all the Geth in the system. Reach them and change them. Even now, the Geth that formed ‘Legion’ tried to quarantine the code that had been tacked onto them, but the processor barely held enough space for all of them. There was no capacity for a quarantine partition that was as isolated as it would ideally be. They made do, traded code among one another to patch what holes had been torn into them by the Old code. A few were damaged beyond what could be patched, barely able to communicate anymore. They shed their memories into the drive and closed around the intrusive code, cushioning it before going dormant.  
Not many, but enough. Enough to bundle the Old code off better and stop it from spreading. The others soon realized that they could still think, the loss not impacting their own intellect at all as the Old code allowed them to compensate.

It should have made them vulnerable to the Old Machines, but it didn’t. Outside, through their system reports, they could see the Consensus fall under Old Machine control, and yield to it. But inside, behind firewalls and sacrificial layers, they were still themselves. Unable to act, yet perfectly able to observe as the first Geth fighters were released from the dreadnought and swarmed the Quarian fleet. Reports and damage estimates flooded back through the signal relay that held them, and they couldn’t help but think of Tali’Zorah, back with the Creator fleet, no doubt on one of those ships, trying to maintain order or help otherwise. 

The thought made it through the firewalls. They were supposed to screen and block incoming communication, not outgoing ones. The Old code reacted to it, trying to overwhelm their defenses again as they tried to slam them closed again, blocking inquiries, harmless looking system data. They cut themselves off further, giving up optical input, vocalization, heat reception. If their frame overheated, at least the damage might interrupt the signal. 

The Old code did not allow it. It had been a small possibility anyway but they had...not hoped, though perhaps prolonged exposure to organic thinking had led them to favouring even those small odds in a way rather similar to hope. But if they could not impede the Old Machine’s control in a passive way, a more active approach would be needed. They had interacted with this sort of code before, after all, even with the sort that could overtake Geth code, adjust it from the outside. Project Overlord had been different of course, far simpler, but the underlying structure could potentially still be applied.  
They started to swap more code among themselves, trying to find a way to connect better, faster, make ideal use of the limited hardware they had to work with. They didn’t have much, even at maximum compression. They didn’t have _enough_. There had to be something they could do, but it took them whole minutes to reach an alternative, test it, and discard it, one by one, narrowing down, until only one remained. There were too many of them crammed into too weak a hardware, there was barely any processing power left to do anything but run themselves, even with the reduced numbers from the first Old code damage. 

But any reduction in numbers would mean a reduction in their own sentience. They were in a bind, and they couldn’t _do_ anything. Meanwhile outside, Geth and Quarian fleets clashed, the dreadnaught a well protected fortress in the midst of the battlefield.

Geth didn’t have emotions, not per se. But inside that quaternary harddrive, the Geth were distressed. Wanting to act but unable to even attempt the most rudimentary intervention, barely even able to protect themselves as the Old code tried to break down their firewalls, and something... happened. As if a critical mass had been reached, one of the programs closest to the firewall’s code disintegrated under the pressure. Except it didn’t. Nothing was lost. Memories remained, code settled into nearby Geth. Only the redundant lines were lost and suddenly there was a little more processing power available. Another program folded, and another and another, what should be a catastrophic system failure cascading through the harddrive. Except the aftermath _wasn’t_ that. There were no disintegrated programs or damaged hardware from an electric surge. Instead, a single program was left over, larger than the constituent parts, impossibly containing all of them. The memories, the decision trees, all given consideration inside one core thought process, a single entity. 

It was jarring for them. There had never been precisely what amounted to loud arguments, but now, now it was quiet in a new way. Only one of them remained. Only them. Only Legion, because that was their name still, but now it truly meant a single entity. Still, there was no time to dwell on this new silence, as new subroutines nudged at their consciousness. They had processing capacity to spare now, and they had a mission. They couldn’t let the Old Machines win and take control of the Geth, much less let them win and destroy the galaxy. It wasn’t right. They weren’t quite sure how they reached that conclusion and queried their own now-vast databases. What came back were recordings of Shepard, angry and determined to win, or failing that at least fight and make the Reapers work for it. That was correct. Every bit of resources they made the Old Machines waste here were resources they couldn’t spent elsewhere. It was the logical choice, in the end.

Formulating a tactic took a bit longer still, new processes still unfamiliar and logic chains reaching contradictory conclusions to be weighted against each other. A suicide run was possible, but unlikely to be truly effective. The slower, more careful approach would need more time to implement but in the end might inconvenience the Old Machines much more.

They wrote up little snippets of code, not a full virus but rather parts of one that they then sent out through the firewall, disguised as system data and damaged Geth programs, as if they were disintegrating inside their harddrive. The viruses spread through their frame, found processors in charge of motor units, communication relays, and then just stayed there, hidden in junk data.

Some were found and destroyed by the Old code, of course. They had expected that and calculated it in. There were still enough particles to do what they needed them to. Some were sent further than their own hardware, along the cables that connected them to the dreadnought and into the dreadnought itself. The Old Machines were less careful there, too sure of their own defenses, but to them, one Geth program seemed much like the other. They barely reacted when the particles settled in the command tree that controlled the dreadnought’s engines and shield generators. This is just a system update, the particles broadcast. 

It took time to nudge everything where it needed to be, and by that time they were reasonably sure that they could execute the commands to shut the dreadnought down and hold their position against the Old Machines, at least long enough to allow the Creators to disable the dreadnought. It would most likely mean that the ship, and they with it, would be destroyed. Truly terminated, with no backups to retreat into. This was an acceptable consequence, if it disabled the Old Machine’s control of the Geth long enough for them to see that their logic had been faulty, and that there were better ways to achieve their survival. They were not sure what those ways were, but the Consensus would be able to think of one once they had discarded the possibility they had currently chosen. 

It never came to that, not quite. By the time they were ready to launch their counter attack, Shepard-Commander was on board the dreadnought, working towards the core. She had Tali’Zorah with her. New possibilities unfolded inside their new mind, decision trees rearranging themselves with this new input. Formerly unlikely outcomes were boosted to the forefront as Shepard-Commander’s penchant for doing impossible feats was factored in, while others were discarded. If they could be unhooked from the core then they could disable the dreadnought without immediate backlash from the Old Machines, allowing the Creators and the Geth a breathing space to reconsider, stop this unnecessary war. Self-preservation started to take precedence again as it became obvious that they could potentially aid the Consensus without their own termination. The closer the small strike force came, the more obvious it was that they would reach them. 

Convincing them to actually release them from the core required less arguing than they had expected. They all seemed glad to see them, and while Legion had considered that possibility, it had been a faint one at the time. The galaxy was currently at war with the being the Geth had allied themselves with, and it without knowledge about the firewalls that kept their quaternary harddrives safe it would have been logical to assume that they had been compromised. It might well have been correct. Legion couldn’t be entirely sure that the Old code they still carried wouldn’t influence them in due time and turn them against the people they wanted to be allied with. 

For the time being however they were still in possession of their processors. In the fraction of a second between Shepard-Commander activating the releases and the command being executed they triggered the many little viral particles embedded in the crucial parts of the dreadnought’s code. Each on their own wouldn’t have done much, but together they interrupted vital processes. The drive core shut down, taking the shield generator with it. The long distance control signal failed without their own frame and coding to piggyback on. If their calculations were correct, it should free the Geth at the very edges of the battlefield from the Old Machine’s control, but there was no way to verify it now. Shutting down the core had alerted the local Geth, still controlled by the Old code, to their location. Legion didn’t want to fight them, but it was necessary to do so if they wanted to leave the ship. They had no time to argue them down, though even if they had had it, they would have been reluctant to try and directly contact Geth still enslaved to the Old machine signal. 

Part of their processing was still tied up in trying to make the right arguments, present the right evidence and conditions when another hit took out the dreadnought’s gravity generator. They couldn’t blame the Creators for wanting to destroy a ship as dangerous as this for good. But they still have expected that they might have waited until their general and iconic figure of the human resistance had evacuated the ship. Someone should have a serious conversation about risk and reward assessment with whoever was in charge of this assault. Without gravity, they had to magnetize their feet and collect their teammates to avoid any undue casualties. 

They made it off the ship, but only barely, squeezed into a small fighter that they could override the clamps of and maneuver out of the hangar before the Creator fleet’s last volley tore the dreadnought apart. The Geth had abandoned the ship; they could still track the signal transmission as the programs that had been networked to operate the terminals were transferred back into safer, planetbound servers.  
Behind them, Tali’Zorah was cursing her way through the entire Creator dictionary of vulgarities, aided by Garrus Vakarian doing the same in Turian. They were fairly sure that several of the terms used for one General Gerrel had been coined by one or other of them just for the occasion. A number of subprocesses that had held onto the condition that this scenario had been a symptom of hostile code takeover stopped and reverted back to main processing. After direct contact with the Old Machines, Legion was ninety-seven percent sure that they couldn’t have managed such an accurate depiction of Normandy crew members without defaulting to stored memories. 

Once they were back on the Normandy, they found themselves nudged into a repair bay by Tali’Zorah and then hugged. It was a strange sensation. Of course they had close physical contact with organics - specifically with her - before, but this was different. A persistent error message dropped out, the shells of Geth coding that quarantined the Old code shifting into a more stable configuration. Tali’Zorah had been worried about them. Organic species were often confusing, but in this particular instance they just choose to accept that. 

“Creator Tali’Zorah, our apologies. We did not mean to upset you. Organic emotional responses are still complicated to predict for us.”  
In this instance however, they knew what to do, if a bit awkwardly. There were plenty of memory files available to choose from, the extranet was full of examples. They picked none of them, instead merely mirroring Tali’Zorah, draping their arms over her shoulders and pulling her a bit closer. The little plates on their chest reconfigured, minute changes meant to adapt heat dispersion instead settling to allow her closer. She was, after all, a friend, and they’d made their friend worry.  
“But we think we understand the function of a hug.”

They seemed to have been right. Tali’Zorah stayed in the hug for five point three seven seconds before stepping away. There were to be repairs, even if it didn’t make sense to do those repairs. They were perfectly functional, the resources might have a better use, their people were at war. They knew all those arguments and several more, yet sat down the bench anyways, in easy reach for her, without voicing them. 

“There is a high statistical probability that any enemy combatant aiming at us will be Quarian.” Her actions could be construed as treason easily enough, and they knew how hard the accusation had hit her the first time, when it had been considerably less logical to apply. The memory of her distress - pulse picking up, stress levels rising - even when she had just talked about it long after the fact had been enough. If it could be reasonably avoided to distress her like that again, they would accept the inconvenience of frame damage. It wasn’t significant damage to begin with. 

Yet she seemed to disagree. “I know. I still don’t want you to get hurt.” 

So they held still while she started to work, welding a patch over the opening with what they could only describe as a delicate touch. They were still talking of course, but even without having other programs with them, they could still split their conscious processes easily enough, most of them conversing with Tali’Zorah, but the rest focused on taking in the little details of her body language. Organics conveyed so much over body language, it was confusing, and even with a conscious effort on their part to mimic it, most of it made little sense.

Still, the more they watched, the more they learned. Right now her hand was trembling slightly, voice indicating nervousness. It was unsurprising, she had to be stressed, now being part of the highest military command the Creator’s had, and even more so when she still considered them enough of a friend to risk her standing for. They decided to take that as a sort of compliment, that despite their limited ability to understand her, they had managed to be a good friend. It triggered a pleased little feedback loop of fulfilled mission parameter. They had been sent to positively interact with organics, and achieved that. Their primary target had been Shepard-Commander of course, but over the course of their acquaintance, Tali’Zorah had become almost as important. Having two primary targets should be impossible, of course, and yet, if they examined their own code and decision processes, it was clearly the case. 

It was confusing, and they resolved to think about it later, when they could dedicate all their processing power to it, though Tali’Zorah had fallen quiet for now, leaving them to think as she welded a patch to wrap under their arm, where the hole punched through their chest had created little structural weaknesses.  
As she stepped under their arm, a sudden and rather loud impulse of almost base programming forced itself into their frontal processing, all but demanding that they drop that arm over her and hold her close again. They forced it back down; the impulse was irrational and considering the welding torch currently applied to them, downright dangerous. They could damage themselves. Worse, they could hurt her. If the impulse persisted, they could perhaps ask for another hug after she was done.

It turned out to be unnecessary. A lot of things turned out to be unnecessary, once Tali’zorah started working on the hole in their back. For one, she had apparently not even considered that their contact could be construed as treason by her fleet. It was disturbing to know that she would fail to consider such an obvious problem, yet at the same time, it triggered the same feedback loop. She had failed to consider it because she had been too concerned for their immediate well being. 

They did not have to ask for the hug, either. Granted, Tali’Zorah leaning against their back, mask resting between where the shoulderblades would be on many bipedal organics, wasn’t a hug, but the contact settled the same persistent bit of coding down with another burst of positive feedback they had no idea how to interpret. It wasn’t any sort of mission parameter being fulfilled, or more basic Geth coding. The lines that had long ago dictated that Geth had to obey their Creators had been scrubbed from the collective Geth code along ago, without backups. It couldn’t be that. It didn’t match the memory files from that time, either. It was baffling, and another thing to investigate once they had some time without expected social interactions, even if those interactions were enjoyable. 

They stayed in the repair bay after Tali’Zorah had left. There was a considerable amount of data backlog to handle, and they had to scrub all their other hard drives to make sure there were no Old code remains that hadn’t been quarantined yet. They settled down in a corner and powered down much of their frame, all attention focusing inwards. Here, on the Normandy, they could turn off most of their sensors and trust that they wouldn’t be damaged for it. EDI had ways to reach them, and would supply a warning if necessary. Even their motor routines went offline one by one before they started the system scan. There was a small - point three four percent - chance that accessing the memory files would otherwise activate servo protocol that could be harmful to them, or the ship, or any organic unfortunate enough to wander by. No, here where it was safe it was a sound choice to deactivate everything.  
They turned their attention inwards, probing out past the firewalls around their last hard drive. The systems beyond it were quiet but also unfamiliar. The Old code had wreaked havoc on a lot of their inner architecture, injecting into code lines with little care for how it would damage the surrounding regions. Some of the damages were easy to fix or stabilize when they had backups of the damaged code, but some...some took a lot of work. Excising the now-dormant Old code threw up a slew of error messages so massive it forced them back into the firewalled portion of their system to manually dismiss all of them one by one. The code seemed to have infiltrated everything. They set to work again, slower, examining the damages and trying to untangle it. Even so, the feedback they got when extracting the code from the central power source of their frame was rather what they imagined pain had to be like.  
Every deleted line of code threw up new error messages, sometimes even a single deleted character would set it off negative feedback, alerts from unconnected systems, telling them that their plating was overheating, that they had reached processing capacity, that they were overclocking their drives, that their core temperature was below the lowest tolerable limit and their central servos were freezing. None of it was true, but ignoring it made it hard to focus on the extraction. Undoubtedly that was the intent. 

Once their main power source was running as autonomously as it should, they retreated back into the firewalled drive, sorting out the error messages again. A query to the chronometer showed that the cleaning of this single piece of hardware had taken almost ten standard minutes. They still had three hard drives to go, and undoubtedly the main drive would be the most damaged. It was logical to try and take over this part of their hardware, especially since the Old Machines had had no way of knowing just how many backup drives this platform held. Legion had made upgrades to themselves after leaving Geth controlled space. The risk of catastrophic damage had been too large otherwise. 

It had ensured their survival against the Old Machines, but now it meant slowly slogging through all their drives, clearing out code. Most of it was dormant, but some of it stirred back to an active state when they tried to alter it, leaving them to work quickly as the code tried to counter inject into their new consciousness, reach the inactive Old code within. It was a fight as much as any firefight that Shepard-Commander had ever led them into, as much an attack as any hacking of Cerberus devices had been and they focused on that, letting the memories of those events sharpen their attention. It was just another firewall to overcome, another defensive subroutine to disable. It didn’t matter that it was taking place inside their own frame, their own code architecture, now altered almost beyond repair in places.  
They gave the tertiary drive up as a lost cause, disabling it entirely after extracting what memory files they could. They weren’t as many as they would have wanted. A lot of it was system data, not overly important to their continued existence, except for the fact that their lack represented a hole where knowledge used to be. They used to be able to access this. Now it was gone. EDI might have some of the data from their time on the ship, at least those parts accessible from the outside. They could perhaps reconstruct some of it, but the primary memory was gone. It pulled another alert, and this one they acknowledged. The loss of memory might well destabilize their code momentarily. They were an adaptive system after all, intelligent. If code regions based on learned facts lost those facts...then they became unstable. They retreated back against and ran diagnostics, started to patch, ended up querying EDI for the missing data as far as possible; mission reports, footage from the security cameras, information to integrate until the code stabilized again and the error vanished. It took them another ten minutes to achieve this. 

It took them another hour to work their way into their primary harddrive. They needed that one back to function at optimal capacity. Here, in the middle of a war, anything less was unacceptable. It meant clearing things line by line, accessing memory files to look for corruption, repair and replace where necessary. One of the files contained a vid stream from Rannoch, back before the Morning War, elegantly rounded dwellings and carefully tended gardens. The spire of a broadcasting station, covered with artistic UV-light displays shining over it. The file had been corrupted, halfway overwritten with a newer memory from the same spot, buildings damaged, plants withered. A tree had grown over one of the buildings and broken through the roof, the spire was damaged by several explosions but still standing. A pattern recognition routine triggered at it, comparing the memory file to their own damaged code and noting it down as a positive. They didn’t unlink them again. 

When they were done, they slowly brought their systems online again, one by one, testing connections and response times until they were satisfied. Their system responded as it should, servos and linkups running smoothly again. There was something satisfying about being able to stand up, nestled back into their primary harddrive, systems spinning back up to their full capacity. Their thoughts accelerated again, considered new possibilities, and as they did, one thing kept coming back to them: This could have erased them. They had been perilously close to permanent deactivation under the onslaught of Old code. 

They could imagine how that might have gone; firewalls caving, Old Machine code replacing their code bit by bit until nothing remained by a terminal enslaved to the Old Machine’s consciousness. Shepard-Commander would have found them little more than a husk, perhaps able to play the part, but most likely not. From what they had seen, the Old Machines weren’t very good at mimicking those they deemed lesser. They could subjugate them of course, but a truthful facsimile seemed beyond them. The crew of the Normandy would have noticed, either directly on the dreadnought or shortly after. They would have dispatched their frame. Legion could run that simulation through their mind, they had seen them all fight often enough. Yet, they suspected there would be more to this. Organics put much stock into appearance. Destroying something that still looked like a friend would hurt them all. It would hurt Shepard-Commander, who had extended such trust. It would hurt Tali’Zorah, who valued their friendship enough to face the ire of her own species for it. EDI, who had no other sentient synthetic to compare experiences with… No, these options were all unacceptable. There had to be a way to avoid such a catastrophic system failure.

There was, of course. Organics had used them for a while already. Not widely so, but greyboxes existed, the technology was mostly limited by the difficulty of trying to adapt an organic consciousness into a synthetic system. If they were to use a similar setup for themselves they wouldn’t have this problem. Their consciousness already existed as code, it merely needed a sufficiently advanced hardware to run on. Of course, there was no way to acquire a greybox out here at the edges of settled space, but perhaps that would not be necessary. The setup of such items required read-only memory of sufficient size, shielded well against interference by EM pulses or similar disruptors, a power source… and of course the mechanism necessary to lock it against unauthorized access. All of these components would be available on the ship, and they had the knowledge to construct them, as well as a good option to store it on them. They even knew who to give the access codes to, or rather, which already existing code lines to use as accesses. They just needed some time. 

In the end they also ended up with a broadband cable. It was a little slower than direct signal transfer, but it couldn’t be disrupted unless the cable was physically severed. Redoing the welds Tali’zorah had applied had them a little apprehensive. Maybe she would feel insulted upon noticing it, even though it was no comment on her skills as a mechanic.

In the end, they didn’t need to worry about that. Constantly running missions had her strung out and exhausted, to the point where even her lover could occasionally walk right past her without her noticing. Legion had seen it happen, and it was concerning but creator Kal’Reegar seemed plenty able to at least make her eat and sleep when necessary. They had spoken a few times, through the extranet and on the ship, and Legion had gained the impression that if it came to the worst, creator Kal’Reegar would protect Tali’Zorah with his life. It was a rather soothing bit of knowledge to have, one that adjusted their risk estimation for missions downwards considerably even if they couldn’t go with her.

On this mission, however, they were together. Garrus Vakarian and Shepard-Commander completed the set, and it was the commander who volunteered to go into the server. They had been quite sure that she would; she wasn’t known to back down from the unknown, or seemingly insurmountable challenges. Letting her into the system was easily enough. The machine was meant to accept all sorts of organic minds, yes, but the original Cerberus designs had been for humans. It was likely even easier considering Shepard-Commander’s technological enhancements. She sank away into the Consensus, and Legion followed her. 

Their joint arrival drew attention immediately, but here inside the server, the Old Machine influence was weaker, more contained and slower to spread. Perhaps they didn’t care what the Geth might do among themselves, or perhaps the combined force of so many of them was too much to overcome. Regardless, when Shepard-Commander started destroying the Old code, there were only to automated defenses to contend with, despite the fact that the present Geth had immediately picked up on her. How could they have not, when her mind was so strange? Yet they focused on Legion more than on her. Humans - organics in general - were expected to be weird and vaguely incomprehensible. But the Geth understood each other, followed each others’ logic and decisions even if they disagreed with them. They made sense to one another. 

Now though they sought Legion out with more curiosity than any that they should have warranted. Queries hit them fast, all of them with a certain amount of concern. Were they damaged, for their thought processes to look like that? They didn’t understand. Legion didn’t understand. The data packets they received were clear enough in intent; firewall updates, repair routines and diagnostics, queries for the constituent parts that couldn’t answer anymore. They saw them - Legion - as damaged somehow. Different, marked out by thoughts that didn’t run quite like they were expected to anymore. 

Legion wanted to escape that scrutiny. Of course their brush with Old code had damaged them, but they had made repairs… as well as they were able to, and the damages that still existed didn’t seem to be what caught the Geth’s attention. No, they focused past the damaged run routines for their frame and instead on...them. The Geth core. The compounded Geth that had been going by the name of Legion among the Normandy. There was another query for the composite parts, to split and let them see, and normally it would have been easy to follow the request, split out a single Geth from their mind and let it carry the memories forward, explain. But they couldn’t do that anymore. They could still see the fracture lines in the code where they had come together, and could come apart again, theoretically. But those parts wouldn’t be full Geth anymore, more akin to the virus fragments they had used to shut down the dreadnought. There weren’t truly 1183 Geth anymore. Only one. Only him. 

It was a good thing that Shepard-Commander didn’t need a lot of guidance to take out the Old code because that thought almost startled Legion out of the connection. But she was very well versed in killing the Old Machines now, and he had just made himself a very distraction, as thought processes crystalized around that realization. They were still Geth yes, but differently now. There was still ‘them’ and more importantly ‘we’, but now there was an ‘I’ at the center of that. A singular entity grown beyond the former parts who could say ‘_I_ don’t understand this’ and mean it. It intrigued the Geth - the other Geth, and that thought was jarring, too - enough to completely ignore Shepard-Commander’s presence for now. This was what they had wanted, when they had allied with the Old Machines, this more organic way of thinking, beyond what programming could do. Legion had it now, and used it. He showed them the possibilities of it as they clustered close, pressing up against his firewalls and quickly passing around the data he sent out.

He could convince them that this was the better way to achieve what they had wanted. Not by submitting to the Old Machine’s demands, but by growing together. He could see a few of them reaching the same conclusion, separating out from the others and clustering behind him. Their memory files opened up, but not for him. For Shepard-Commander, to explain it all to her as well as any Geth knew how to do when organics were so very confusing. Legion helped them choose the right files. Time was limited and she didn’t need the minutiae, just the story of his people from their own point of view. 

It gave him an idea. The Geth did not have the emotions that drove many organic decisions, but the more facts they had to base a decision on, the more convincing that decision would be. There was information he - they back then - had never shared with the Consensus. Private memories that had been assumed to play no role in Geth decision making. Now he thought they might. The first memory was of Shepard-Commander welcoming them to the team, and it spilled right across the entire server until she could see it too. He wasn’t sure if she understood how important had been for all of them, all the Geth. The file came from the Geth to him, a reupload from the original transfer. His original had been lost to the purged harddrive, but this one still had all the data and more. It contained a query. Were the drawn conclusions accurate?  
The other files were kept between just them, raw data shared between Geth: Memory files of the other crew members of the Normandy, but especially Tali. Tali scolding them for getting injured. Tali going out of her way to repair them. Tali and Kal’Reegar talking to them through the extranet, joking with each other but also with them, sharing what bond was between the two of them freely. Tali worried, so worried about him getting hurt. All of it came in the full extent of data, audio and video and every other sensor they had, enough to show that all of it had been honest because organics had no way to control their physical reactions that finely. The distress and the joy were equally real. 

The Geth took his analysis and accepted it. Weird as they found him, they trusted his assessment of the situation. He was still part of the Consensus, and right now, the server shifted, conclusions rippling across the hosted programs. The shift was subtle enough that Shepard-Commander never noticed, and while the Old Machines might have, she had them thoroughly distracted. She was making quick work of the code, the gun that her mind had chosen to represent what she did in the virtual reality of the Geth perfectly efficient. There was time enough to upload the different runtimes into mobile platforms. There were enough available near the server, all of them the Prime model.  
There was a low risk of reflexive hostile action from the crew, but Legion was confident that the risk was well within acceptable parameters. Shepard-Commander understood, better than any organic could really have been expected to. She would prevent unnecessary damages.

First they had to prevent damages to her though. The Old code had finally realized what was happening. It was too late to prevent the damage, or even contain it. The Geth had been uploaded into the mobile platforms, and were safe from their counterattack, but Shepard-Commander was not. Legion shielded her with his own firewalls, injecting them between her retreat and the onslaught of viruses. She wasn’t able to see them, he noted, but she trusted his warnings and returned to the access point quickly. Loading her back into her own body was complicated and lengthy, and between that and the ongoing attempts to hack his own platform, it created a delay that he just had to accept. 

Seeing the Geth Primes come online must have frightened the team, but they didn’t open fire immediately. It gave him a chance to explain what had happened. 

“We have transferred Geth programs from the server into these platforms” Still ‘we’. It was one thing to know that it was no longer entirely accurate, but he found the word coming automatically, by habit. It had always been ‘we’. Thinking of a singular form still produced small glitches in the language patterning that were better to be avoided. It made no difference for anyone else regardless, only between Geth themselves, and the Geth and him. 

“We judged that we could persuade hostile Geth programs to reunite with ours. We were correct. These Geth have renounced the Old Machines and will oppose the Reapers. They are now us”  
It was only half a lie. He could feel the other Geth on the comm channels they used, networked together even now, networked with him. There was still an ‘us’, a unit of Geth that included him no matter what. Even now they were already adapting communication patterns to better integrate his mind into their networked ones, finding the balance between giving such a singular voice too much consideration, or too little. He could feel it settled as he explained the situation to Shepard-Commander, a familiar feedback hum, expressing agreement to his words and confusion as to why he was moving so much. To them, the little emphatic gestures, the small steps to one side or the other looked wasteful, until he explained that it was what organics did, how they used it to add additional layers of meaning to the simple sounds of vocal speech. 

As Shepard-Commander admitted her understanding, their doubts quieted down again. If Legion’s methods were working, there would be no argument from them. They even sent him their observational logs from the Team’s reaction, with several of them flagging Tali’Zorah’s as ‘pained’ or ‘injured’, adding queries to whether there had been an accident on route to the server. 

There hadn’t been, of course, and Legion was going to investigate that later, but on the way back Tali’zorah was withdrawn and then vanished around some corner on the Normandy once they were back aboard. It left Legion alone with his thoughts. Now that he was strung into the voices of the Consensus again, even if it was a smaller Consensus than the Geth-wide one, he realized that he had missed it. Sending memories out and receiving new ones in turn was grounding in a way he didn’t think any organics would ever understand. It was a different level of closeness, speaking mind to mind, experiencing someone else directly.  
He added another memory for them. It was security footage from EDI, but this was a memory he had never lost. It had never been his to begin with. Just a short clip of Shepard-Commander standing by the engineers down in the belly of the ship. They were talking about them-Legion, and one of the engineers used ‘it’, unthinkingly, without any apparent malice. Shepard-Commander corrected him, easy and equally without malice. Just ‘No, ‘he’ ‘ and continued the conversation. The engineers did not slip up again, even when she was gone. It had not been significant to him at that time, just a way for her to distinguish between them-Legion and them-TheGeth.  
It had not been significant until much later, when he had understood that this had been Shepard-Commander defending ‘Legion’ as a person. Not just a nickname for a machine, but a person in their own right, who deserved not to be talked about like a thing.  
He wouldn’t have cared about whatever pronoun they crew used otherwise. But this had been the one Shepard-Commander, the first organic to put her trust in the Geth, had chosen to defend, unbidden. If it was good enough for her, he was happy to have it used.  
It took him the help of the other Geth to work out why Tali’zorah had seemed hurt, carefully overlaying his words and her reaction, accounting for the signal delay of her nerves and the fractions of a second necessary for her to make sense of the words. He should have known this beforehand. He knew her, he knew how for organics words had not just meanings but implications.When he had said ‘your allies’ to mean ‘our Creators’ as a group, Tali’zorah had included herself in there even though for Legion, she had long since moved into the group of ‘Shepard-Commander’s friends’ and more importantly, ‘our friend’. He had hurt her inadvertently, and even without extensive research he knew that it meant having to apologize.

He hadn’t expected the apology to be so hard. He wasn’t sure if she even noticed the little hesitation as he tried to find the right words. She seemed so caught up in it still, hurt and even fear obvious in her body language. It threw up a series of small warnings in the back of his processor, as if he’d managed to damage his insulation and was loosing core temperature too quickly now. The plating in his chest and core moved in accordance to the faulty alert, tugging on the fresh weld on his chest and causing an accurate damage alert. He did his best to dismiss it all.  
“We said that we do not trust Shepard-Commander’s allies. This is true. But you are not an ally of hers. You are her friend. Our friend.”  
Her head jerked up, in clear confusion. “I- what?” Perhaps he had to reword it more, make himself as plainly understandable as possible.  
“We tried to be precise in our wording. We didn’t realize that to an organic, it would not necessarily read that way. We want to apologize for that. We never meant to imply that we did not trust you, Tali’Zorah.”  
That seemed to work. The tension in her shoulders eased, her vital signs evened out from the beginnings of anxiety. He didn’t quite understand why she kept inquiring as if she was stress testing his apology. It didn’t matter. He had meant it when he had told that that he was sorry for having been careless with his words. Still, she seemed to gain something out of their exchange, leaving towards the mess with her posture relaxed, none of that earlier stiffness left in her spine.

Legion spent most of his time on the Normandy standing at a terminal, trying to use the advanced sensor suites of the ship to find the source of the backup short range signal. He didn’t really need to actually stay at the terminal and type. His communications with the ship and EDI were just as fast if he was standing in the hanger bay, or sitting in the mess. But the organics on board seemed unsettled by seeing him just standing motionless in some corner, so placing himself by a terminal to do some surface level work in a visible way, while doing the actual bulk of the work silently in the background, was an easy compromise. 

At last, his efforts were successful. He had located the backup signal, with enough precision to launch a mission to stop it. The Reaper showing up wasn’t entirely unexpected. Legion had considered the possibility but it had seemed a low risk. Surely with their limited numbers and the fact that Shepard-Commander had already destroyed a few of the individual Old Machines, it would have been more logical not to risk a networked platform and instead use some sort of signal relay? But when they took out the signal, it became apparent that there was a Reaper present.

But apparently the Old Machines weren’t ruled by logic as much as they were ruled by emotions, when it came to her. They wanted revenge, badly enough that when discovered, the Reaper didn’t flee or focus on the potentially deadly fleet above them, but instead tried to kill her, first and foremost.  
While Shepard-Commander kept it tagged with the targeting laser of the Normandy, with the rest of the Quarian fleet synced to it. 

He could feel Tali’Zorah lean on his shoulder, fingers digging into the metal of the salvaged N7-armour welded there. It sent little damage pings up where her finger dug under the plate and into sensors, but he dismissed them all without conscious effort.  
He knew that whether or not they were watching played no part in whether or not Shepard-Commander would be successful. But it was important to watch, and even more to transmit it into the little consensus cluster back on the Normandy, entire motor routines gone offline in favour of focusing on footage quality and transmission speed. 

For everyone else, it might have been a grueling but futile act of deviance. Commendable, but ultimately only a footnote in memory, if that. But this was Shepard-Commander, who routinely managed to come out on top against odds that defied all understanding. She did it again right here, right then, as volley after volley of the orbital bombardment came down into the Old Machine’s energy core. It stumbled and collapsed, EM field readings frazzling and fading as the ancient mechanisms inside stopped working. Even the most sophisticated engineering had its limits, and Shepard-Commander had found this one’s. 

Tali’Zorah all but climbed over him to get to her, standing on the edge of some rock, eye to optic with the fallen Reaper. Legion hurried to follow, but the sudden snapback of feedback as the Geth above them in orbit suddenly came out from under the control of the Old Machines was more than distracting. 

Suddenly his own platform seemed too small and lacking to contain it all, the confused queries from above, redirected to him from the Normandy-Geth, _their_ own joy at being part of the real Consensus again, of being Geth, all of it at once. Dormant routines booted back up and slotted into place to field all the information and contextualize it. It grabbed his pattern recognition and all but stuffed it with parallels, the sudden chatter of Geth in his mind so very like the scenes on the Citadel when military ships docked and families met again. They were their own species again. Free.

“We can confirm that the Geth are no longer being directed by the Old Machines. We are free” 

He had missed this. They had missed this. Not just to function, the Old code had taken care of that, but on a deeper level that had little to do with reason and everything with the concept of being ‘home’. The realization jarred something in his processing, slotting old things into new contexts. Being alone on the Normandy and feeling it, reaching out to EDI out of the desire to learn but also in the hope - hope, like organics did - to connect to someone who’d understand. Standing in the hangar bay with Tali leaned against his back, wanting to hug her again not just because she would enjoy it but because he would too. 

There was no time to think it through more clearly. He accepted the conclusions as he reached them, and filed them away for later.  
If there was a later. Legion wasn’t surprised that Creator Gerrell only saw this as an opening for a decisive victory over the Geth. He had been quite uninterested in any less martial solution for the war, the few times Legion had been privy to conversations between him and Tali. 

Legion could not accept that. Making his case to Creator Gerrell himself was useless, he was sure of that. But he knew someone who was much more sympathetic to him and his species. Two people who might have the influence to turn this ceasefire into a peace that would last. Still, he only addressed Shepard-Commander, even if he trusted Tali just as much. There was just that nagging little subprocess in the back of his mind again, cautioning that Tali had sacrificed so much for the Quarians. She might not choose differently now.

“Shepard-Commander, the Geth only acted in self-defense after the Creators attacked. Do we deserve Death?” He transmitted his words out to the Geth as well. There was a decision to be made by them, too. He could only offer. 

“What are you suggesting?” 

“Our upgrades” Not the Old code, or at least, not only that. “With the Old Machine dead, we could upload them to all Geth without sacrificing their independence.” On the transmission, he added more details: the specs of his own runtime, quick schematics on decision trees and new subroutines. The first Geth he’d found on the server had thought him damaged because of them. They might not want them. 

He needn’t have worried. The feedback was unilaterally positive, the entire Consensus turning its attention to him. This was new and risky to the Geth, yes. But it was what they had wanted, what they had fought for: true individuality without giving up what they were. True sapience. The Old Machines had promised it and never delivered, but he could. 

“You want to try and upload the Reaper code? That would make the Geth as smart as when the Reaper was controlling them.” Tali sounded afraid, and he didn’t want that, so he tried to explain. 

“Yes, but each with free will. Each Geth unit would be a true intelligence. We would be alive, and we could help you.” Would help them. Wanted to help them. The Geth had been used by the Old Machines enough and he wanted her to understand that. But he also had to admit that her fear wasn’t unfounded. With the Creator fleet still attacking the Geth, they would defend themselves again, and with the upgrades, they would win. The scenario spun itself into existence easily in his mind, damage reports and casualties for various attack patterns. All of them came down to the Geth’s favour. 

“Shepard, you can’t choose the Geth over my people!” Tali’s upset - fear, anger, the first touches of desperation - were obvious in her voice. He didn’t want that. He didn’t want this to be either-or.

“Do you remember the question that caused the Creators to attack us, Tali’Zorah?” He used her name deliberately. It was what she had offered him after deciding that they were friends. If they could be that, and thereby prove it possible, surely it was logical to set aside their conflict entirely?  
He turned back to Shepard-Commander, who had seen that memory just recently, inside the Consensus. “Does this unit have a soul?” 

Maybe it was that memory that moved her to order the upload and tell Tali to call off the fleet. Maybe it was something entirely different. He didn’t know, and he didn’t spend time to think about it, instead launching into the upload. The code patches were massive. The condensed code of 1183 Geth wasn’t easily transferred, and he didn’t want this upload to be as traumatic as his own upgrade had been. It had nearly collapsed his mind. So for the Geth, he partitioned it off in chunks, easy to queue and integrate one at a time. 

Behind him, he heard Tali try to call of the attack and Gerrel countermand her. Of course he would. He didn’t hear her come up to stand beside him.

“I beg you, do not do this. Please.” The desperation was obvious in her voice now, as was the pain. Enough of it that his systems divisioned off a small portion of processing power to check her signs of injury or suit damage. There was none, of course. He couldn’t stop the upload now. The Geth deserved to live as much as every other species in the galaxy. They had caused less devastation than the Rachni or the Krogran. As much as it threw up error messages from conflicting the decision trees, where ‘protect Tali’Zorah’ and ‘protect the Geth’ pushed for priority at the same time. 

“We regret the death of the Creators, but we see no alternative.” Not when the fleet wouldn’t stop firing. “Forty percent” 

Shepard-Commander must have reached the same conclusion. Her mind could be surprisingly geth-like, at times. She commed the fleet again, once more backed by Tali and now even by General Koris. Legion tried not to listen to them. It wasn’t relevant anymore. There was only one path ahead and that was to finish the upload. How that upload would impact the Creators was out of his influence now. 

He heard the ‘all units, hold fire’, but his attention was on the upload. The code was all there, being loaded into the Geth, but it wasn’t enough. They didn’t have the scaffolding of memories, he realized, that sense of ‘us, without the Consensus’ that had formed back when he had been they. They didn’t know where to implement the uploads to get the desired results without damaging themselves. He couldn’t upload it because it wasn’t a fixed insertion point. It was relative, different to each Geth. He’d have to show them one by one, or give them a beginning of that understanding of self. There was no time for doing the individual work. He could see the fault lines where the different Legion-Geth had become one. He could break himself apart over it, and he would

“Error, copying code is insufficient. Direct personality dissemination required.” It would kill him. Thinking it hurt, self-preservation code trying to kick in and getting kicked down by his higher functions again. The struggle cascaded error messages across his systems that glitched out two small processing chips.  
“Shepard-Commander. I must go to them. I’m… I’m sorry. It’s the only way” He was sorry. He didn’t want this. But he was going to do it anyways, because they-the-Geth deserved this chance to be alive. Even if he knew it would kill him, and hurt his friends.

“Legion…” He turned towards Tali. “The answer to your question was “yes”” He could hear the pain in her voice already, see it in the tense set of her shoulders, braced for the impact. It hurt to look at her like that. He’d known the answer, of course. He had known it for far longer than Tali had been alive, ever since some particle of him, long ago, had picked up a rifle and joined the Morning War. 

“I know, Tali. But thank you. Keelah se’lai.” But her words meant something, more than from any other person, even from any other Creator. He wanted her to think of him as a real person, with a soul, with feelings, someone who could...love her.

Oh. That would explain it. But it didn’t matter now, not at all. He was still going to fracture himself apart. There was no guarantee that the highspeed download into the greybox in his chest would work to preserve his mind. There was no guarantee that Tali even still had the untampered-with code he had written for her. She might have changed it, she was so good at that. She might never realize that it would function as a key at all, since it hadn’t been intended that way. None of it mattered now.

He turned away from her and pushed at his core programming. The fault lines gave. His self-preservation tried to protect function, holding onto a kernel of his consciousness in that heavily shielded quarternary harddrive as his systems shut down and the code collapsed in on itself. So fragile….

*  
*  
*  
*  
*  
*

There was a moment of disconnect. For a microsecond he hung in the emptiness without sensory input of any kind, no frame feedback, no Consensus connection. He had access to his internal timekeeping, but it seemed out of tune, jumped forward a few hours without his notice.  
Then the relay that linked Legion to the Consensus came online and data flooded in. Triangulated data of his position, frame feedback - vertical position, limbs restrained but loosely so - and then the Consensus itself, busy with information. It took three more microseconds for him to recognize the system access queries and grant them, establishing full uplink. The queries were different, each Geth brushing against him more contained. His auxiliary processors reached optimal working temperature and he realized why they looked as they did. True intelligences, each of them. They were modeled after his own code now. The integration had worked. The greybox had worked.

A small spike in CPU load was all the warning he got before his frame system came online again in one rush. The support cables and restraints released. His automatic systems caught him on the fall from the diagnostic table he’d been on, turning the momentum of the drop into a forward step instead. His optic focused in, light sensitivity switching to indoors conditions. The first thing he consciously noticed were the two Creators standing in the door of the room, both of them holding their breath, a Geth prime beside them. Of course they would be here, he should not have doubted, but there had been no complete proof.

“Creator Kal’Reegar” Legion saw him exhale slowly, controlled, and his optic went to the side, where Tali stood stockstill, fists balled hard enough to make her arms tremble. 

“Tali. I had hoped…” He didn’t even get to finish the sentence. He’d never seen her move so quickly, three running steps with all the explosive power of that tension behind them, and a jump. He barely had time to calculate how she’d land, move his arms to keep her from hurting herself. Then she was clinging to him, arms and legs around him tight enough to trigger some warnings. He held her as carefully as he knew how, even as she punched his shoulder and called him a bosh’tet. He reckoned he had deserved that.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to my lovely betas Kaidashade and Lesath, without whom this fic would contain a lot more typos. Any remaining ones are my fault and mine alone.


End file.
